Retail

 At the beginning of July, we told you about a major rebate snafu at Newegg.com (see original story). In short, Newegg advertised a crazy low price (after rebate) for a reconditioned Samsung HDTV. The form for the $30 rebate, however, listed an incorrect UPC code for this television, which would likely mean that all consumers who bought the TV would have their rebate submissions denied.

MrConsumer swung into action, writing to the PR folks at Newegg, hoping that they would notify the rebate fulfillment house of the error so as to avoid the inevitable rebate denials that would follow. Newegg stepped up to the plate, and sent reassuring emails to all purchasers of this TV that their rebate would be honored despite the fact that the UPC code on their box didn’t match the number requested on the rebate form.

End of story.

In true Ronald Reagan “trust but verify” mode, MrConsumer submitted the rebate form, managing somehow to remove the huge UPS sticker the Newegg shipping department had placed over the TV’s actual UPC code. As expected, that UPC code did not match what was stated on the rebate form.

Several weeks later, the rebate fulfillment house sent MrConsumer an email entitled “Newegg Eligibility Confirmation.” Good news, right? Not so fast.

The email said that my submission had been processed and that I should receive their “response” by September 17. What do you mean “response,” don’t you mean your “check” was mailed? A call to the rebate fulfillment house revealed that the rebate had been rejected because the UPC submitted did not match the UPC requested on the rebate form. No kidding, but that was supposed to have been fixed, right? Not.

*MOUSE PRINT:

The customer service person at the rebate fulfillment house said she is getting calls like this every day, and instructing people to call Newegg because they will send out the correct UPC for resubmission. Both a call and a chat session with Newegg customer service was met with shrugs, with them not knowing anything about sending out a correct UPC. Enough.

MrConsumer emailed the PR guy at Newegg, explaining the situation, noting that Mouse Print* was going to do a follow-up story on the company failing to live up to its promised correction. Apparently that email sent shock waves throughout the company. By the end of the business day, Newegg explained what happened in a most candid way, and outlined how it was going to fix the problem, and put in place procedures to prevent its recurrence:

Your note really shook us up and we pulled together a number of teams to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Here is our plan of action and how we plan to never let this kind of thing slip through again. As always, we do appreciate your notes. Customer satisfaction is something we proclaim, so when we fall short, we like to know about it and get it resolved. In today’s process, we learned there was a critical communication gap between our product managers and our customer service team that led to this problem. Once we understood the problem (a technical way in which rebate codes get passed from product managers to customer service reps so the reps can validate them), which cut off about a third of the certificates that were being given to customer service–we set about making good for our customers and then updating our process so it doesn’t happen again. Here is our plan.

1. We learned that 3 rebate periods needed to be adjusted
* 5/20-6/8 $30
* 6/20-6/23 $30
* 7/4-7/21 $40

2. We will check the following for those periods
* Submitted rebate
* If rebate submitted with wrong UPC, honor rebate and notify customer of processing.

3. In the event that no rebate was submitted
* For those customers who have not submitted a rebate, we will contact them and have them submit it with the UPC code that they have.
* For those customer who state the shipping label is covering the UPC code or do not have a UPC code, we will honor the rebate either as a Newegg GC or credit back to original payment

We will make sure that all denied customers get their rebate.

Now to make sure this never happens again, our customer service team has set up a meeting with our product management team to review the proper application of rebates and how to make sure they appear in the customer service agents’ validation work flow.

This outline of steps is being put into action now. We are crafting the email being sent and it should go out this week. The new process and meetings should also take place this week. I will keep you posted on our progress.

Wow. In reply, we thanked Newegg for their swift action, but gently pointed out other related lapses they hadn’t acknowledged. We urged the company to incentivize their customer service agents to spot and report problems raised by individual consumer complaints that might be affecting other customers. That way a global solution could be implemented, and complaints reduced.